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This study focuses on the early years program at International School Hong Kong (ISHK), a school with an explicit mission towards global mindedness. The program aims to move beyond narrow conceptions of us/them, north/south, and east/west binaries. Instead, ISHK urges children to view the world holistically through a range of perspectives. Within the context of ISHK, the early childhood program encourages children to understand the concept of interdependence through strong relationships and caring for others and the environment. The school draws from both Deweyan and Confucian philosophies in an effort to blend ideas of the East and West. Confucian ideals, in particular, support the need for a child to become junzi ([Chinese characters omitted], an exemplary person) through harmonious relationships, respect and appreciation of differences, coexistence with others, and compassion for the natural world. Deweyan views of democratic relationships support children in learning to work together and find common ground with others. Findings from this study suggest that children at ISHK learn to engage with and challenge peers, encounter and respect cultures other than their own, and investigate ways to conserve the planet. Through this program, children appear to be building early competencies for long-term global engagement.

Field experiences during teacher preparation programs support teacher candidates in forming and reforming teacher identities through real-world teaching situations. Trying out teaching approaches with children, reflecting on practice, and collaborating with cooperating teachers support teacher candidates in building a teacher identity. However, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, public schools closed in many states, requiring that field placements either end or change significantly. This is a study of five teacher candidates in an early childhood teacher preparation program. These candidates' field placement ended in March 2020, requiring that university faculty develop an alternative teaching placement. Using Bourdieusian theoretical concepts of habitus, field, and doxa, this study explores how the candidates perceived this change and how they were able to continue to reflect and build their teacher identities.

In the world of teacher education, the ability of teachers to adapt is associated with effective teaching. In the midst of a worldwide pandemic, however, teachers' adaptability was put to the ultimate test. With this in mind, this article explores the journey of two preschool teachers as they embarked on the sudden move from face-to-face to online instruction alongside school administrators, parents, and young children during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a tripartite model of adaptability, the authors examine the cognitive, emotional and behavioral adaptations employed by the focal teachers, as they supported the learning process in a multilingual and multicultural early childhood program under unprecedented teaching conditions. The article highlights the lessons learned during this traumatic time and the innovative ways educators partnered with families to develop new means of collaboration. The paper ends by calling attention to the socioeconomic line of division that exists among various populations both locally and globally, which shapes the educational landscape in significant ways.

While teacher education programs are increasingly creating short-term study abroad programs to support developing teacher interculturality, programs often focus on schools typical of the host country. Few programs target a specific philosophical approach and its enactment in classrooms. This case study focuses on a two-week trip to the city of Reggio Emilia and other cities in northern Italy. The program was intended to support students in deeper understandings of the Reggio Emilia approach as well as the ways in which the approach is culturally embedded within northern Italy with the goal of students recognizing more profoundly how the approach adapts to international contexts (e.g., the United States). Students studied the Reggio Emilia approach (an approach previously encountered in university courses) and its practical application in the municipal infant/toddler centers and preschools in the city. Students demonstrated understandings of the approach and the enactment of the Reggio Emilia approach in the local context. This led to deep reflections of themselves as teachers and learners.

Background/Context: Since 1975, 3 million refugees have resettled in the United States. However, researchers and educators know little about the lives of refugee children and families entering the American educational system. Much of the extant research groups refugee children in families with other immigrant groups, failing to recognize the complex histories that children fleeing civil unrest bring with them. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: This study brings a spotlight to the story of a refugee family from Guatemala, focusing on their experiences premigration, during migration, and after resettlement in the United States. Our focus was on seldom-heard experiences from the perspective of a refugee family. Members of the family left their home country because of civil war to resettle in a foreign country but within a familiar community. They found resettlement more challenging than they expected; they had difficulty activating cultural capital within this new field because of varying levels of community support. Research Design: This is an intrinsic case study that explores the specific case of a mother and daughter. Participants were interviewed at length about their migration experiences. Interviews were analyzed in multiple cycles of coding, with a focus on the participants' own words and emotional responses. This study uses a Bourdieusian lens for analyses and to aid in defining feelings of unease that the participants described when reflecting on their experiences. Conclusions/Recommendations: Learning about a refugee family's journey is a privileged experience. There is much that educators and others who work with refugee children can learn from extended conversations with families. This study is one example of millions of stories that children bring with them into the classroom. This study's impact is to honor and give a platform to the refugee population whose voices are often not heard in schoolhouses across the country.

Family involvement has become increasingly recognized as essential to academic success. However, the racial and cultural gap between the teaching force and students in American schools is large and expanding, leading to increased challenges associated with relationship-building between families and schools. This is a study of teachers in a school district in the State of Florida that has high rates of poverty, large numbers of new and undocumented immigrants, and many families who speak languages other than English at home. Using a Bourdieusian theoretical framework, this study investigates teachers' recognition of their own habitus and that of families and of the doxa within the field of the school. This study asks the teachers, by their own accounts, what prevents them from greater success in developing and sustaining culturally sustaining family-school partnerships.

School psychologists are encouraged to establish family-school partnerships with culturally and linguistically diverse families across the spectrum of child development. Partnerships and collaborations have been described in prior literature as bidirectional, nonhierarchical relationships between families and schools, expanding on the more traditional but limited concept of unidirectional parent involvement in school. This qualitative study describes five specialist-level school psychology interns' experiences facilitating family-school partnerships with culturally diverse families during their internship year. Findings focus on defining and identifying characteristics of family-school partnerships from interns' recollections of their lived experiences. Five salient elements characterized the practical experience of a partnership: requisite situations for partnering, stakeholder involvement, intern's actions, intern's emotional responses, and the outcome or quality of the family-school partnership. These findings have implications for the training of school psychologists and the ways that family-school interactions are conceptualized both in training programs and in school settings.

As an officially trilingual special administrative region of China and an economic powerhouse in Asia, Hong Kong has invested heavily in dual language schools that emphasize learning English alongside of Cantonese or Mandarin at all levels of education. Little research has explored how learning and language use takes shape within these schools, particularly within early childhood educational contexts. This article analyzes how young learners in Hong Kong early childhood program that adheres to an emergent curriculum and inquiry-based pedagogy develop trilingualism though translingual communicative practices. Specifically, we showcase conditions for trilingual participation within one classroom, as well as how children within it negotiated peer relationships through linguistic improvisation and accommodation.

This is a case study of four students in an early childhood teacher preparation program at a large, state university that intentionally seeks to emphasize supporting children and families from diverse backgrounds and using culturally responsive pedagogy. The program includes a family engagement course in the first semester that is designed to facilitate students' recognition of the perspectives of diverse families, as well as practica in schools serving children and families from a range of backgrounds. Our investigation revealed that not all of our participants were willing to completely let go of their preconceived understandings of family diversity and engagement, but those who did were very willing to try multiple ways of building mutually beneficial relationships with families. Our findings suggest that teacher educators must have an understanding of the cultural and family backgrounds of teacher preparation students so as to better support students in decentering and resisting normalizing their own family and school experiences.

An increasing amount of attention and public funding has been dedicated in recent years to the field of Early Childhood Education and the expansion of early childhood programs in the United States. Program quality in early childhood is evaluated based on program-level structural features and instructional support (e.g. problem solving, feedback, and language modeling), but quantifiable measures of structural and process features do not necessarily equate to quality instructional interactions. Questions remain about the presence and strength of socially constructed power dynamics found in pedagogic practice. This case study seeks to illuminate interactions between children and teachers in federally funded Head Start classrooms, teachers' views of children, and influences to novice project work using the Project Approach. The project work served as a frame for viewing interactions between teachers and children as mediated by varying degrees of power and control of teacher--child interactions at the classroom level (identified as "socio-structures"). Questions investigated were the following: (1) What are the socio-structures inside these Head Start classrooms before and during the implementation of the Project Approach? (2) How do existing socio-structures relate to teacher-child instructional language interactions during the implementation of the Project Approach?

Post-colonial Hong Kong is an officially trilingual city with significant numbers of residents speaking English, Cantonese, Mandarin, or some combination of all three. Competency in these languages is promoted through educational policies and practices at all levels of schooling. Using concepts from the Deweyan framework of democracy and education, this article explores relational practices among bilingual co-teachers at a private, international early years programme in Hong Kong that emphasizes democratic philosophies of learning in their efforts to promote trilingualism. Findings point to co-teachers' interest in developing collaborative relationships, and prompting interest in additional language use through promotion of children's interests, along with tensions they experience as they grapple with instruction in multiple languages. Findings point to a need for more nuanced understandings of co-teaching dynamics in post-colonial multilingual learning contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The case study, H is For Hurricane and M is For Maria explores the public Montessori System of Puerto Rico as an educational philosophy of resilience. The authors present a counternarrative to early literacy development on the island by focusing in on two public Montessori schools from Vieques, Puerto Rico. The study was conducted one year after the passing of Hurricane Maria. Data collected, highlights the strong effectiveness of combining children's home life experiences together with foundational early literacy development. Through this piece, teachers and parents share how they teach early literacy by making the absolute most of what surrounds them physically and culturally. Puerto Rico is poorer than the poorest state yet has had the fastest growth of public Montessori schools, than anywhere else in the United States. Major conclusions state that access to public Montessori education in Puerto Rico offers children an advantage in early literacy development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates barriers to facilitating family-school partnerships with immigrant families as identified by teachers in an urban school district with high rates of immigration. Participants consisted of 18 elementary teachers who identified predominantly as Hispanic (38.9%) or non-Hispanic White (33.3%), were frequently bilingual (55.6%), and were mostly female (94.4%) with an average age of 36.5 years. Participants engaged in focus group interviews that were transcribed and open-coded. Barriers to engagement for immigrant families fell into 3 broad areas: language and culture, family resources, and families' undocumented status. Many teachers attributed the barriers preventing parental collaboration to school policies (94.4%) and ineffective communication strategies (83.3%). Teachers also identified barriers as emanating from the families themselves, including families not attending school functions (88.9%) and being unresponsive to school-initiated communication (72.2%). Teachers noted that many families lacked resources necessary for school engagement (88.9%) and were hesitant to become engaged with schools due to required screening procedures (55.6%). Overall, numerous barriers to effective family engagement were identified, several of which are directly related to immigration and residency status. Given the strong evidence suggesting that family engagement in education mediates risk for children of recent immigrants, strategies to foster meaningful engagement for all families are desperately needed (Naughton, 2004). Roles for school psychologists to facilitate effective family-school partnerships are discussed.

Using a Bernsteinian theoretical framework, this study compares two American early childhood centres, one with a primarily progressive pedagogy (Frank Lloyd Wright Family Centre) and one with a primarily traditional pedagogy (Casimir Pulaski Centre), in high-poverty Chicago neighbourhoods to examine the effects of different pedagogic practices on the development of academic and non-academic skills in young children as measured by pre- and post-testing and observations over five months. The collected data demonstrate that students at Wright experienced greater levels of academic development than students at Pulaski. Children at both sites showed development in literacy and social/emotional skills, but the children at Wright also show development in problem-solving and imagination--skills that aid in abstract thought. While further study is needed on a broader scale, results from this study suggest that early childhood programmes with more progressive elements have the potential to better prepare children for elementary school than programmes with more traditional elements.

Field experiences during teacher preparation programs support teacher candidates in forming and reforming teacher identities through real-world teaching situations. Trying out teaching approaches with children, reflecting on practice, and collaborating with cooperating teachers support teacher candidates in building a teacher identity. However, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, public schools closed in many states, requiring that field placements either end or change significantly. This is a study of five teacher candidates in an early childhood teacher preparation program. These candidates' field placement ended in March 2020, requiring that university faculty develop an alternative teaching placement. Using Bourdieusian theoretical concepts of habitus, field, and doxa, this study explores how the candidates perceived this change and how they were able to continue to reflect and build their teacher identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]